The Birth and Death of Radical Ideas

The anarchist principle is by and large true. And far from being "utopian" or a "glorious failure," it has proved itself and won out in many spectacular historical crises. In the period of mercantilism and patents royal, free enterprise by joint stock companies was anarchist. The Jeffersonian bill of rights and independent judiciary were anarchist. Congregational churches were anarchist. Progressive education was anarchist. The free cities and corporate law in the feudal system were anarchist. At present, the civil rights movement in the United States has been almost classically decentralist and anarchist. And so forth, down to details like free access in public libraries.

Of course, to later historians these things do not seem to be anarchist, but in their own time they were all regarded as such and often literally called such, with the usual dire threats of chaos. But this relativity of the anarchist principle to the actual situation is of the essence of anarchism.

There cannot be a history of anarchism in the sense of establishing a permanent state of things called "anarchist." It is always a continual coping with the next situation, and a vigilance to make sure that past freedoms are not lost and do not turn into the opposite, as free enterprise turned into wage-slavery and monopoly capitalism, or the independent judiciary turned into a monopoly of courts, cops, and lawyers, or free education turned into School Systems.
- Paul Goodman, "The Anarchist Principle"

Everywhere we are faced with the banalization and corruption of ideas that were once at the forefront of avantgarde thought--that were once interesting. Marxism staggers on, zombie-like. (Years ago I was waiting for a bus in Los Angeles, when a demonstration marched by, carrying an enormous pig and screaming "What do we want? The end of property! When do we want it? Now!"). Nietzschean tropes resurface in self-help books. Critiques of technocracy and reification are repurposed into New Age platitudes. The Jeffersonian war against "any form of tyranny over the mind of man" has become an insipid and insincere source of legitimation for the lowest common denominator of democratic ideology. Enlightenment freethought turns into Dawkins; Diogenes the Cynic becomes domesticated.

How are we to respond to this relentless movement? With an equally boring critique of consumer capitalism? With a Mandarin scoff at low culture? With a fatuous attempt to maintain these ideas in their purity and "relevance"? None of these seems wholly adequate. Elitism, nowadays, always entails provincialism as well. And consumer capitalism is just as welcoming to critiques directed against it as it is to plaudits. To speak of pure ideas is an unachievable Oakeshottian ideal, and "relevance" may as well be banality.

What Paul Goodman proposes, mutatis mutandis, is a much more profound and practical approach. An idea is not radical--or anarchist--in itself. Radicalism is the name for a particular relationship between an idea and the conventional wisdom of its time. For Goodman, by implication, even ideas traditionally considered immutably anarchist (the One Big Union of anarcho-syndicalism, for instance) will become corrupted into forms of power, and must in turn be confronted from an anarchist "outside." The question is always one of responding to the present context with a challenge, not defending and institutionalizing a particular complex of ideas. By no means is this solely a question of political radicalism: Socrates was a radical, just as Heraclitus was, just as Ezra Pound was. One must always keep on the move.

This conception has three clear advantages. The first is that the world is no longer something to be reshaped to fit a fixed ideal of perfection. In the classless society of communism, in the anarcho-primitivist wonderland, the radical still remains to point an accusatory finger. (For those of us who have few other skills, this is a valuable result). The second is that the lifeless ideas of today can be attacked without a denial of their substantive truth. Feminism, undoubtedly, makes true claims; but it is equally clear that much of it today is worthless and derivative, no longer radical but status-quo, as evidenced by the various polemics surfacing during Hillary Clinton's campaign. The third is that it allows us to dredge up old ideas in the service of critique, without doing violence to their real commitments. For instance, we can read Swift and Burke without making them into proto-Marxists in our image and likeness, although agrarian paternalism can only go so far. If these ideas have a pragmatic use for a contemporary radical, they can and ought to be deployed; when they lose it, they can be just as easily abandoned. And even outside of the pragmatic context, they can be admired aesthetically: the violence of a radical critique is beautiful, whether it's in Ned Ward or in Savonarola.

It is a hard road, the via negativa. And in some ways it leads to a dead end, if one begins from the presumption that there ought to be a concrete and positive destination. Still, in this endless and pointless struggle, there is something of a justification for the intellectual's existence. If Socrates can come down to the Piraeus, if Zarathustra can abandon his mountain, then we can go down too, even if its only to teach the people the error of their ways.

On Speaking Truth to Power

[Bukharin's] letter, in effect, is addressed over the heads of the plenum right to the editors of these Laborite newspapers in England, to the editors of the American left-bourgeois magazine The Nation, which is a mouthpiece for Trotskyites. It's not by accident that you write in the beginning of the letter: “For many months I have suffered unbearable moral tortures. I am being accused of Trotskyite crimes, etc.” And then, so that a photograph of your letter could be printed just like that, you write: “But I declare that, when I make it through the gauntlet of these unheard-of tortures, the most horrifying tortures...” The word “moral” isn't there anymore.

Why did you write this? So that you could say, with your pack of fascists, traitors, and spies, that you suffered the same tortures that must have been used, according to the slanderous theory of these bourgeois magazines, to extract confessions from the Trotskyites. Radek—a scumbag of scumbags—found the courage to say that he wasn't tortured, it was he that tortured the investigator; you, of course, could find nothing of the kind. I must say that you are torturing us in the most unacceptable underhanded manner, you're not being tortured. (Voices from the audience: Right, right!) For many, many years, you have tortured the Party, and you owe the fact that we haven't politically torn you apart for your vile terrorist work only to the angelic patience of Comrade Stalin. We would have done it a long time ago, two months ago, if it was not for Comrade Stalin, if policies guided by the interests of the working class did not, for him, outweigh the feeling of righteous indignation, if it was not for his ability to see farther and better than all of us.

And how do you repay the Central Committee for its long-suffering tolerance of your filth? You declare “a hunger strike.” Indeed, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich [Molotov] said it right, that future generations would laugh at Bukharin, who starved every day from 12 o'clock at night to 10 o'clock in the morning! (Laughter.)
- from a speech delivered by V. I. Mezhlauk at the February-March (1937) plenum of the All-Union Communist Party Central Committee

"Speaking Truth to Power" has been a self-deluding intellectual fantasy probably for as long as intellectuals as a class have existed (although the phrase itself is quite recent). On the face of it, the idea is ridiculous. What could we possibly say to Power that it doesn't already know, or that would change its nature? Are we to appeal to its supposed better instincts, or perhaps trust in a transformative act of individual self-assertion through speech act to totally reconfigure the schemata of domination? (The latter is the "courtroom drama" model.) No, neither of these suggestions can possibly bear the weight the concept places on them. It is increasingly clear that it is simply yet another instance of the way intellectuals exaggerate and puff up the value of their own discourse--a concealed power claim if there ever was one.

A more nuanced account of what speaking truth to power entails would look something like this. Power depends upon an underlying network of lies, propaganda, and half-truths. If people knew the truth, power would no longer be able to survive, to maintain its domination. It is then the intellectual's job to cut straight through the bullshit and expose the dissimulation in order to score a victory for the cause of liberty. (This theme comes through most strongly in the eighteenth-century political press. Its most vivid metaphor is the 1984 Apple Super Bowl ad, with the woman breaking Big Brother's telescreen.) There is a sense in which the act of telling the truth itself is something that cannot be processed or accommodated by the system, and must lead inevitably to its downfall.

Bukharin's letter to the Central Committee suggests that this hope is an act of self-delusion as well. Far from shaking the epistemological foundations of the Stalinist system of repression, the implication that confessions were extracted by torture leads to ridicule and jeering on the part of the apparatchiks. We are not torturing you, Mr. Bukharin, you're torturing us. Speaking truth to power only acts as a piece of meat thrown to the sharks, raising the totalitarian orgy to its highest triumphant pitch.

In fact, what this model of speaking truth to power presupposes is not that power itself will hear the indictment and obligingly dissolve, but that the lies of power will be exposed before the eyes of the people. One does not speak truth to power, one speaks truth to a public. And what this allows the Stalinist system to do in this instance is to completely recuperate this liberating movement into its worldview; the nature of the public being addressed (allegedly being addressed!) is sufficient to discredit the speaker and brand him even clearer as an agent of Trotskyite counterrevolution. It is immaterial whether what he had in mind was really to address the left-bourgeois Western press: by reconfiguring the circumstances in which his statement was presented, Stalinism could have always partitioned off the real public (faithful and utterly trusting of Pravda) from the illegitimate and ideologically suspect one.

This problem goes to the heart of why "speaking truth to power" is an idealistic fantasy at best and an ideological mystification at worst. It assumes that the mode of address is neutral, that the discursive circumstances in which a statement comes to operate are somehow independent from the more general atmosphere of repression. In other words, it seeks to give discourse a privileged place in political praxis as an eternally unassailable high ground. A vain hope, but one which it is in power's interests to carefully and deliberately build up.

The Country in Revolt

In fact, we often believe with criminal superficiality that to educate the masses politically is to deliver a long political harangue from time to time. We think that it is enough that the leader or one of his lieutenants should speak in a pompous tone about the principal events of the day for them to have fulfilled this bounden duty to educate the masses politically. Now, political education means opening their minds, awakening them, and allowing the birth of their intelligence; as Césaire said, it is ‘to invent souls’. To educate the masses politically does not mean, cannot mean making a political speech. What it means is to try, relentlessly and passionately, to teach the masses that everything depends on them; that if we stagnate it is their responsibility, and that if we go forward it is due to them too, that there is no such thing as a demiurge, that there is no famous man who will take the responsibility for everything, but that the demiurge is the people themselves and the magic hands are finally only the hands of the people. In order to put all this into practice, in order really to incarnate the people, we repeat that there must be decentralization in the extreme. The movement from the top to the bottom and from the bottom to the top should be a fixed principle, not through concern for formalism but because simply to respect this principle is the guarantee of salvation. It is from the base that forces mount up which supply the summit with its dynamic, and make it possible dialectically for it to leap ahead.
- Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

The relationship between the Russian Revolution and its rural environment was, at best, uncertain and conflicted. The Bolsheviks, after all, were the Social-Democratic Labor Party, a party of the urban proletariat, and their state was always a union of Workers and Peasants--never the other way around. From this, too, stemmed the repression of the Socialist-Revolutionaries, the only important agrarian party. And yet it was a stubborn, non-ideological peasant resistance that prevented the survival of Tsarism, then caused infinite headaches for the Soviet authorities.

When Ezra Pound writes in his Canto XXVII, among the best of the bunch--

And these are the labors of tovarisch
That tovarisch lay in the earth
And rose, and wrecked the house of the tyrants
And that tovarisch then lay in the earth
And the Xarites bent over tovarisch

--he is describing a historical dynamic, an "ancient machinery," that the Revolution did its best to suppress. For what he is talking about is the spirit of revolt that slumbers in the country, awaiting, like the Once and Future King, the coming of the black day when it is needed. Mass revolt, explicit in Pound and suppressed in the Revolution, belongs to the chronotope of the land--the cyclical time of harvest, of death and rebirth. Thus the Bolsheviks had no choice but to suppress it, ideologically and physically: nothing could have posed a greater challenge to historical materialist progressivism.

Frantz Fanon refuses to allow that the town, the intellectuals in their cafés, can make any real contribution to revolt. It is the masses in the country that create revolt, that truly "unite and take over." With his analysis of anti-colonial strategy, therefore, Fanon becomes the first serious revolutionary theorist to take into account the cyclical longue durée nature of popular discontent. Indeed, he does not simply take it into account--he builds it into the core of his theory. The flowering of the rural "interior" is as much a goal as liberation itself.

But can Fanon ever be totally successful? To the corruption imposed by the national bourgeoisie, he opposes the self-assertion and self-consciousness of the (rural) masses through the Party. His portraits of the former are chilling in their accuracy and prescient in their predictions. But his views of the latter seem somehow too optimistic, an opportunity doomed to be lost. He depends on a crucial mistake--confusing an evolving Marxist model of class-consciousness with the rising of Tovarisch. If the peasant masses have once risen, he seems to say, that is enough evidence for their ability to organize and to conceive of themselves as masters. Dialectically, the attempt to do so is inscribed in a drive to take the power of making history away from the settler and appropriate it for the native.

That is a vain hope--and it could never have been borne out by subsequent events. The truly insightful part of Pound's vision is that he sees the way in which specific institutions, specific people, specific events, cannot escape or control the mighty stream of the recurrent that underlies any accidental event. To try to make an agent out of Tovarisch is to ignore the fact that he is bound by laws much older and more powerful than any politics. The inevitable failure of this project entails two things. First, revolutionary theory cannot really ever make productive use of cyclical revolt. Second, revolutionary theory is empty and without purpose--because revolt is only ever a manifestation of the historical cycle.

Aleksey Gastev's Post-Futurist Imaginary

Order 05

Funeral rites at the cemetery of planets.
A howl in the catacomb of worlds.
Millions, into the manhole of the future.
Billions, weapons stronger.
Labor camp of the mind.
Chains of the heart.
Engineer Everyman.
Drive geometry into their necks.
Logarithms into their gestures.
Defile their romanticism.
Tons of indignation.
Normalize the word from pole to pole.
Phrases on the decimal system.
A boiler company for speech.
Annihilate verbality.
Make the tunnels resound.
Turn the sky red for arousal.
Gears—at superspeed.
Brain machines—high load.
Cinema eyes—fix.
Electric nerves—to work.
Arterial pumps, activate.
- Aleksey Gastev, A Package of Orders

I was first introduced to Gastev by one of languagehat's posts, but it is only recently that I really took the time to read him. In translation, he sounds only slightly stranger than in the original--Russian relishes its long, periphrastic sentences that dreamily meander from clause to clause, and the gunshot-like exclamations of Gastevian verse sound like a violation of every sacred principle. Indeed, at first Gastev looks like an ideal Futurist: he celebrates power, suddenness, and violence at the expense of all past aesthetics, gleefully throwing away sentimental affectations grown inadequate for expressing the mechanical magnificence of modernity. A prophet of Communism like Marinetti was to be the prophet of Fascism.

And yet. Reread the Futurist Manifesto: does it not bristle with useless Symbolist incrustations, half-hearted attempts at playing Baudelaire? It is exultant and energetic, true; but the violence of its promise is buried beneath the dead weight of fruitless metaphor. It is a reflection of a gaudy, nineteenth-century modernity, not the lean and muscular force of twentieth-century blood and iron. And for all its exhortations, the Futurist Manifesto really looks backward as much as forward. Sartre once mocked this kind of thing:

in Cocteau’s story Round the World in 80 Hours ... one of the characters declares, because he is flying over mountains in an airplane, “Man is magnificent!” This signifies that although I personally have not built aeroplanes, I have the benefit of those particular inventions and that I personally, being a man, can consider myself responsible for, and honoured by, achievements that are peculiar to some men ... That kind of humanism is absurd, for only the dog or the horse would be in a position to pronounce a general judgment upon man and declare that he is magnificent, which they have never been such fools as to do – at least, not as far as I know.

Futurism loves modernity for its achievements, but it is only a parasite on it. If it was condemned to historical irrelevance, it is because it tried to play vanguard to a host that had no need of it.

Gastev could not be more different. Where the Futurists sing paeans to a transformation already in progress, Gastev's art is a project first and the aesthetic embrace of its realization second. "LET US RAISE A MONUMENT," he proclaims, "TO ALL THE DARING ONES, who call us TO THE REFASHIONING OF MAN." In the world of modernity, the possibility of a complete refashioning arose for the first time; for Gastev, that implied a commitment to the possibility, not to its germ. Gastev glories in the recreation of the earth as a gigantic artistic enterprise unlimited in its aspirations, while Marinetti skirmishes uselessly with his contemporaries and rehashes Rimbaud's old and stale "il faut être absolument moderne."

It is difficult for us to really believe that Gastev is not being tongue-in-cheek when he speaks of brainwashing, machine-brains, twenty defective cities. He sounds like a caricature, because the possibility he represented has long shriveled up into a thorougly unaestheticized (anaesthetized) cinematic nightmare. Even the thought of a refashioning of man calls up unpleasant Nazi demons. But that was the risk Gastev took when he chose to embrace a poetics of possibility; the Futurists today merely sound young and naive, but Gastev's world remains near enough, just over the last hill, to still exude uncanniness and power.

Aznavour and the Allure of the Pathetic

Dans le bruit familier de la boîte à la mode
Aux lueurs psychédéliques au curieux décorum
Nous découvrons assis sur des chaises incommodes
Les derniers disques pop, poussés au maximum

C'est là qu'on s'est connu parmi ceux de notre âge
Toi vêtue en Indienne et moi en col Mao
Nous revenons depuis comme en pèlerinage
Danser dans la fumée à couper au couteau

Viens découvrons toi et moi les plaisirs démodés
Ton cœur contre mon cœur malgré les rythmes fous
Je veux sentir mon corps par ton corps épousé
Dansons joue contre joue..
- Charles Aznavour, "Les plaisirs démodés," 1972

This song is interesting on a number of levels. The first, and most obvious, is that the message of the song, perhaps the original "rockist" lament--modern pop music sucks! old music is much more authentically soulful and conducive to intimacy!--is replicated in its musical arrangement. It shifts schizophrenically between fashionable, high-BPM rhythms and the familiar Sinatra-esque stylings of Aznavour's other work (although personally I think the former are much catchier and better produced).

The less obvious thing is that this song involves a massive dose of hypocrisy. Aznavour appeals to authenticity, but he himself is a fake, a deliberately nostalgic reconstruction of a prewar French music-hall tradition. In a way, he never even attempted to conceal this dimension of his artistic persona. He played on nostalgia always with a sly wink at the necrophilia that lurked at its heart. (This comes out in the plaintive "La mamma," with its dead grandmother who will "never, never leave us").

In fact, this move has a broader significance in the context of his work: it represents one aspect of the allure of the pathetic. The pathetic is the indefensible--not from a moral point of view, but from a visceral and socially conditioned one. The ridiculousness of a sighing, necrophilic nostalgia is one example. His other songs provide still others: the man standing in the corner at a party and watching the object of his affection flirt with other men; the jilted lover who knows he mustn't act out, mustn't show his pain, but does it anyway, desperately and ineffectually. Hence listening to Aznavour, despite his music-hall stylings, can be a deeply private experience. It is difficult to publicly acknowledge one's identification with these sadsacks.

Defending the pathetic involves a form of courage all its own. Even Nietzsche's morality is less courageous: the transgressive appeal of the egoist and the murderer somehow provides the basis for a plausible transvaluation. The sadsack can only inspire pity--and yet he is among the most common figures in our lives (and in ourselves). In a sense, the sadsack confronts us with the only interesting moral problem many of us will ever face, far more than the black-hearted murderer or the Resistance hero. To resolve the problem of the pathetic, it is necessary to purge all shame and revulsion from our relationship to him.

Of course, the pathetic is a recurrent cultural theme, especially in Russian literature (Chekhov's "Death of a Civil Servant"; Turgenev's "Diary of a Superfluous Man"). The Brothers Karamazov veers off from resolving the problem at the last minute: Smerdyakov never becomes a character we can truly accept. Aznavour, with his repeated identifications ("et moi, dans mon coin...") and with his life devoted to nostalgia, provides the materials for a true resolution--in an appropriately pathetic low-culture genre.

'The Thought of the Age'

"Without us having any say in the matter, all our ideas will be lumped together under the heading, 'The Thought of the Age.' Take the history of art, for example: it proves my point irrefutably, whether you like it or not. Each period has its own style, and no artist living in a particular era can completely transcend that era's style, whatever his individual outlook."

"Does our age have its style too?"

"I think I'd be more inclined to say that the style of the Meiji era is still dying. But how would I know? To live in the midst of an era is to be oblivious to its style. You or I, you see, must be immersed in some kind of living or other, but we're like goldfish swimming around in a bowl without ever noticing it.
... In a few decades, people will see you and the people you despise as one and the same, a single entity ... You see, this is the easiest way to establish the essence of our era--to take the lowest common denominator. Once the churning water has settled to a calm surface, you can see the rainbow oil slick floating there."
- Yukio Mishima, Spring Snow

I bought this book as a birthday gift for a friend of mine, having a vague memory of reading it many years ago (and, strangely enough, remembering nothing except the nape of the Imperial Princess' neck). So I had to read the whole thing before I handed it over. I was not disappointed; it is indeed a strange and wonderful novel. But in particular, I find it incredible because it develops a theme I think is especially compelling: the relationship of the subject to the philosophy of history.

The book is centered around a series of conversations and plot twists that circle around or explicitly engage the question: how are we, as people, to stand in relation to the inevitable forward march of history? From one point of view, Mishima presents an existentialist, almost Benjaminian, position of horror and angst before the accumulating pile of garbage that is history, and a deep despair about inevitably joining it. From the other, the standpoint of the novel's "social setting," history is tradition that must be frozen in time and admired into meaninglessness, the slightest infarction against this cryogenic order threatening even the bonds of society itself. This conflict is more than just pretty philosophical window-dressing for a cute retelling of Romeo and Juliet, though that is what it looks like. In fact, the entire multi-layered web of conflicts that drives the story depends on a philosophy of history.

Mishima's solution is elegant and, from his point of view, inherently Eastern (the following, though, is simply what I think he was intending to get at. I don't know if I hit the mark, and the author, having ostentatiously suicided in 1970, is unavailable for comment). Debates about continuity and totality in history, anxieties about violating tradition, are the driving force of history itself. It is a fallacy to think of history as a smooth and continuous line (whether sloped towards progress or decline), because history is a series of revolts against tradition. But at the same time it is also a fallacy to think of history as discontinuous: each act of spontaneous rebellion is the echo of a thousand other such acts. Everything is constantly being destroyed, then recreated.

What is the role of the subject in all this? Mishima presents a form of Buddhism that washes the subject away, fragments him and distributes him throughout the dharma. One of his characters argues that Western Cartesianism, its inability to release its hold on the subject, leads to the fanatical obsession with chance as the only guarantor of free will. But if we realize that there is a law beneath everything, he asks, what of chance, what of free will--and what of the subject? All disappear. (The profound penetration of this argument can be seen in the way it prefigures contemporary debates about the implications of quantum theory for the mind-body problem.)

The book teaches a last lesson, an unintentional one. It tells us, almost directly, that we are not to read it as a tragedy: transgression and death are not disruptions, they are the order of things. But we do anyway. Mishima's writing, even at its most philosophically fraught, never ceases to be poignant. And it makes us come to the realization that even if catastrophe is an illusion, the pain of losing oneself in the historical garbage-pile--and the pain of severing the tie with tradition--does not become less real. It becomes a mood raised to the status of a principle of existence. Mishima's melancholy end only confirms its inescapability.